Earning a living in a post-industrial, knowledge-age society requires lifelong learning, training, and retraining at every level. For the vast majority of workers, interrupting work to go study in a traditional university setting is out of the question.
The virtual university, or cyberschool, is education dispensed from an electronic platform instead of a lecture hall podium. A cyberschool delivers education to people, instead of people to education.
Virtual classroom design innovator Starr Roxanne Hiltz, the Distinguished Professor, Emerita, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, once advised:
“The Virtual Classroom is one of those things that is best experienced, like a sunset or a swim in ocean waves, in order to fully understand it…think of all the different kinds of learning tools and spaces and ritualized forms of interaction that take place within a traditional classroom, and within an entire college campus or high school. All of these things exist within a Virtual Classroom, too, except that all of the activities and interactions are mediated by computer software, rather than by face-to-face interaction.”
The advantages of the virtual university’s being virtually anywhere—in a living room, a kitchen corner, or the local library—are clear: All students in a particular class don’t have to be at the same place at the same time, week after week, for the course of a semester. The virtual university is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For adult learners with jobs and family responsibilities, the ability to do coursework on their own schedules may make the difference between successfully completing a degree program and dropping out.
For more about Dr. Hiltz, visit her Web page.
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